Re: Self-referential types

[Richard D Riehle <laoXhai@ix.netcom.com>]

In article <7um9ji$dor$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
	Robert Dewar <robert_dewar@my-deja.com> wrote:

>My own view is that good names are an *adjunct* to good
>comments, not a substitute for them.

Many software products developed in Ada are based on some
larger systems engineering specification.  The software must
reflect the constraints of that specification.  For example,
in one communications satellite software effort, it was common
to see comments that referred back to a paragraph of the
engineering specification.  

It would have been quite foolhardy to rely only on the names of
the entities.   Many of these names described some complicated
calculation that could only be understood by looking at the
underlying mathematics in the engineering specification.  For
trivial programs in which one is simply getting and putting
data to and from files, meaningful names might be enough. For
serious engineering applications, we need comments that correspond
to the original specification.  

As usual, we use the kind of tools appropriate for the problem
space and solution space.  I am beginning to think that people who
make up hard and fast rules for computer programming are people who
no longer actually write programs.  Perhaps they never did.

Richard Riehle
http://www.adaworks.com